


In April. (And I keep holding on.)

by ftwnhgn



Series: no written guidelines. [5]
Category: Spring Awakening - Sheik/Sater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety Disorder, Depression, F/F, F/M, Germany, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Recovery, Social Anxiety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-16 21:30:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10579869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftwnhgn/pseuds/ftwnhgn
Summary: If he doesn’t do something soon, he’s going to kill himself before he ever hits thirty-five and he knows this. They all know it. Hanschen’s sad eyes and Ilse’s stern voice and Wendla’s phone calls and his mother’s desperate attempts to reach out and his own flat, his bathroom that saw all of his breakdowns, all his surroundings know it.And if he’s not doing this for them, or for himself, then he’s doing it for him.He can’t go on like this.Melchior's story gets an ending.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Let's begin. This story needs an ending! (Brandon Uranowitz Voice)
> 
> Hello, hello, hello. I wanted to post this on the anniversary of the end of IW(BTNLTL), but I fucked that up because of Uni and five of the six scenes not yet written. I wrote the first scene shortly after I finished CME(AEKH) and the Big Scene was in my head since I first wrote for this verse. As we all know, I can't really stand Melchior, but this verse needed to be finished and I wanted to bring it all to a close. I also wanted to have him interact with the other characters more, so yeah, this is it.
> 
> No Written Guidelines is now finished, mainly, I think. I started this as a therapy session for myself between the end of my first semester and the start of my second to deal with my whole palette of issues. Now look what this turned into! I am so thankful for anyone who read one of these stories. For real. This is the first fandom I ever really published something on here for, and I want to thank everyone for the small but kind words and for taking the time out of your day to even click on this all. Even if it's just a small part of people I reached and all in all just a small part of this giant fandom, I am glad to be a part of it! S/O to all of you!
> 
> As always, this is unbeta'd and I'm not a native speaker and I'm sure I fucked up lie/lay somewhere in the middle of it. I apologize for this and any other dumb error I made.
> 
> I leave you to it.
> 
> Title: In Between and Holding On - Tales From The Bad Years, Kerrigan and Lowdermilk (very fitting for Melchior and Moritz in that story.)

_And I knew, there would be moments that I'd miss_  
_And I knew, there would be space I couldn't fill_  
_And I knew I'd come up short a million different ways_  
_And I did, and I do, and I will  
_ _\- Pasek and Paul_

No one has ever told Adalind why her father has not been spending time with her during the first years of her life or why her mother hasn’t been in a relationship with him ever she could comprehend a thought, or why her father sometimes still misses special occasions like her birthday or a school play or her mother’s birthday or uncle Ernst’s parties.

It’s good this way.

Melchior doesn’t have the heart or the capacity of a stable mind to even start to explain to her the complexity of the whole story. Firstly, he’s not proud of what he did to Wendla, has never really forgiven himself for his fucking dumb teenage behavior, and the guilt is something he will carry with him forever, a permanent reminder of knowing he could have done this whole thing differently, better. Secondly, and an even bigger reason for him, is how he has not yet learned to explain to anyone what happened to what has been the most sacred person in his life. He can talk with Hanschen about it, sometimes, in some bits when the timing seems right, but that’s so rare that they haven’t even covered the surface of the toll it’s taken on Melchior and his _whole_ life, not even beginning with unearthing his medical condition as a consequence of it. It’s no secret that his health went down the drain about a day after it happened.

He resigned himself to a life of lethargy and darkness, to the impossibility of moving in a direction that does not involve his best friend.

Because, somehow, everything he does still involves him. His job – a choice he made when they were still together and mapped out their future. His apartment – a direct result of getting as far away from anyone without totally abandoning them after graduation due to his inability to form or rebuild emotional bonds with anyone. And it’s close to his psychiatrist’s office. His friends – kept to a minimal size of people that also knew them back then and are now still bothering with him and his antics. His lifestyle – another result of what happened, if Melchior’s panic attacks and mental breakdowns and unhealthy coping mechanisms are anything to go by.

See, anything that comes in contact with him or is coming from him in general is nothing but sick poison. Melchior has to keep rubbing off on other people to a minimum, so it’s just natural for him to not ever plan on telling his daughter about the incident.

Yeah, just because Hanschen could crack him open and manage to unhinge some of his closed doors, doesn’t mean that he’ll open up to anyone. He’s not that crazy, and certainly not ready for it. Two people are enough for now, Melchior decides, as he watches Ilse and Ada trying to let a kite fly in the harsh October wind.

The rest of the people in his life don’t deserve his mess.

He’s picking at the apple bites in the Tupperware Wendla prepared for him and watches the other families in the field – happy families, intact families, well-functioning, fathers and their sons, mothers and their babies. All in all, _healthy people_.

Melchior still doesn’t fit in there. Probably never will, it’s far too late for this. And why should he blame anyone than himself on it? Because one thing is sure: This could all have been prevented if he would have acted differently about twelve years ago. (Or was it thirteen? Fourteen? He’s not even sure about that, because time has become a foreign concept to him, an ever-stretching thing that never makes sense.)

Point is, he’s not pushing his darkness, his clouds and all of his rain, on other people. And least of all on someone who is filled with so much light and hope and luck. Ada doesn’t need this.

So, he never even mentions his name around her.

 

*

“How is therapy going?” Hanschen asks while leaning against the desk in Melchior’s office, peeling an orange absentmindedly and his blue eyes are uncharacteristically warm.

Since Melchior’s breakdown on Moritz’s anniversary a few years ago Hanschen has been incredibly soft-spoken and invested in Melchior’s well-being. Of course, he’s still there to flick Melchior on the forehead and remind him what an asshole he really can be, but the other half of the time is spend with caring an awful lot. It’s all Hanschen does these days around him – caring. As if he knows something about Moritz that Melchior doesn’t.

Maybe Melchior is just too compromised to look for the bigger picture.

And it’s not like Hanschen is forcing himself onto Melchior. He knows that he only has to say the word and Hanschen will disappear back into his firm and busy himself with caring about other people’s problems for a living, for _money_. Honestly, why does Hanschen even bother to do it for free? Sometimes – well, most times – Melchior doesn’t understand the man at all.

“It’s good,” Melchior answers, knowing full-well that lying to Hanschen is never a good idea. So he learned to work with a middle ground. He’s telling most of the truth and covers the harsher parts of it, so Hanschen can go home to Ernst or can pick up Wendla’s call and tell them that Melchior is not suicidal anymore, or at least not visibly.

“ _Good_ , huh?” Hanschen repeats and raises his eyebrows in curiosity.

Of course, the blonde doesn’t take his short phrasing as an answer. Of course.

“We’re working on the anxiety. And the depression. And the neuroses. Mostly. It’s all very step by step. You know _this_ , Hanschen, I told you all of this before,” Melchior sighs.

Hanschen crosses his arms, the fruit still in his left fist, but its zest in the garbage bin next to Melchior’s desk, now curling around old grad papers and failed attempts at letters written for his sessions. “I know, you idiot,” he deadpans, but the sharp sting in his voice bleeds out before he says the next words. “I want to know if you already talked about the root of the problem. You know, if you’ve talked about _him_.”

Melchior cuts Hanschen some slack for keeping his voice so conversional, like they’re discussing the news or one of his cases, because he knows that it’s not easy for him as well. He knows this, and yet Melchior feels the bitter sting of selfish misunderstanding rising in his throat to settle in an even worse taste on his tongue and between his clenched teeth.

Breathe in, breathe out, avoid eye contact when it gets too much, and keep it simple.

 _You’re not entitled to him_ , Melchior tries to tell himself. There are other people grieving for him as well.

“No, we haven’t,” Melchior answers truthfully, his voice reminiscing the dryness of sandpaper.

Hanschen’s eyebrows now draw in, a frown flashing over his handsome features, before they settle into a grim line around his mouth and, in contrast, sad lines around his eyes. He’s never not sad around Melchior, it’s like an aftereffect of his caring nature.

Must be Ernst rubbing off on him after all their time together.

“Okay,” Hanschen replies. He doesn’t sound happy.

Oh, boy. Now Melchior was able to even upset him, out of all people.

“I’m sorry,” Melchior tries.

“Don’t apologize,” Hanschen tells him. “Not to me.”

*

Ilse is sitting down across from him. The small coffee shop is mostly empty, the rush of lunch break emptying out more and more any minute and there are enough free tables for her to sit down, but she has chosen the one Melchior has occupied for himself.

Naturally, he suppresses the anxious feeling clawing its way up his chest and into his lungs. He closes the book he was reading and pushes his Netbook out of the way to give her the sign that he has registered her arrival.

“Ilse,” he greets her, trying to sound more cheerful than dreadful. After his encounter with Hanschen two weeks ago he hasn’t really seen anybody of his friends, busying himself with work at home and at college and ignoring when Wendla calls him every evening. When he can ignore his mother, it’s even easier to ignore Wendla and not feel intensely horrible for it.

Ilse, seemingly, is a bit harder to ignore. Especially right now.

“You’re an idiot,” she spits and the soft features of her face look rock-hard.

The bad feeling is settling in his lungs now and Melchior tries to hide the growing angst with a phony-sounding cough. His hands busy themselves with his cold coffee mug, he’s avoiding her cold glance by studying the pages of the book in front of him. And when he turned into a coward he is not sure, it must have been between burying his best friend and graduating as the best in his year. Or maybe it was when his mother told him.

“I am?” he replies, still not looking up.

Ilse is gripping his arm suddenly, her nails swiftly biting into his skin under his black shirt. It hurts, fever-pitch like and Melchior hisses and wants to draw his arm away, but she strengthens her hold on him to an iron-grip.

It makes Melchior look up at her.

“You are,” she repeats herself, still not sounding in any way _friendly_ or _nice_. “Been for about fifteen years now, but who’s counting.” He cringes at the backhanded insult, but he probably deserves it. “And I am done with always coming out to get you out of all of your shit. So, you listen to me once, Gabor, and you’ll listen closely because I’m not doing this again.”

Melchior nods although he has no idea what possessed Ilse to act like this.

“Good,” she smiles, but it disappears immediately from her face again. “Ada needs her father. Okay, she needs him. And I am not saying this because of some shitty heteronormative excuses about families, because, let’s face it, Wendla and me have done a good job raising her without your help. Look, we’ve given you so much tie to get better. Like, it’s been years or something. But, Melchior, you’re not progressing. You’re not moving forward. I wish it would be this way, but it’s not. And Ada needs and deserves a family that cares about her as much as she cares about them. And she cares a hell lot about you. Melchior, she loves immensely.”  
  
Melchior can’t help but be shocked by what Ilse is telling him. Not the part about him not getting better, this he knows more than well. But about Ada. To be honest, he never really thought that Ada would care a lot about him. Sure, he got introduced to her as her father and they work on their relationship constantly, getting along in a way old friends would but clearly not a father and his daughter. And he loves her, loves her a lot, but he always thought that Ada would do the same in return, would love him like family. Like she loves Wendla or Ilse.

“Yeah, that’s right, you fucking idiot. She loves you. So, get a grip, Melchior. Get a grip on yourself and finally talk about him. You can’t bury it all and keep on acting like the past doesn’t exist in front of other people. Ada needs a father that’s there for her, in the present, and not the wreck that you are. You can be glad she hasn’t asked yet, but she’s the age where she notices these things. So, it’s time for you to do something about yourself. I don’t care if you rot to death without ever improving your life in any way, but she cares. And Wendla does. And Hanschen too. And because these three people are the people I love most in my life, you’re going to do it for them. Not for me. Hell, not even for you. But for them. Got it, Gabor?”

Melchior can’t really do anything else than nod again. The lump in his throat has the size of the Reichstag, so he doesn’t trust himself to speak up. It wouldn’t bring him any luck anyway, that he’s sure of. So, he just nods at her.

She removes her grip from his arm and smiles happily at him. “I knew I could count on you,” she says nicely and it doesn’t even sound like she’s faking it. Because that’s what Ilse is – incredibly loyal and undeniably nice.

“You have to move on, Melchior,” is the sentence she leaves him with before she’s getting up and exits the coffee shop.

Melchior doesn’t look which direction she takes. Instead he’s just looking at the screen of his Netbook but without really looking. He feels like he just got up from being underwater for a long time, like someone opened the glass door for the main actor to finally take over the play and clean up all the mistakes made on stage. He still feels the ball of anxiety nestled between his lungs and his stomach and his heart rate is probably way too high for him still being able to sit here as still as he does, but he feels weirdly touched by what happened.

He remembers the night at that damned house party in April, when Hanschen was the first one to ever look at him and see something more than shattered pieces leaking with guilt and shame. He remembers Ada at him at Hanschen and Ernst’s wedding, how she asked him all these things about his work and his life and her mother and Ilse, and why he’s here and why he’s looking so sad on his own.

He remembers when he lay in a field and looked up at the stars and was happy, truly and freely happy.

He remembers how he could put on a lighter jacket when he went to work after the weekend in April.

His body has failed him years ago, he knows and remembers this as well and as good as all these other memories, but he’s looking at the screen of his Netbook and then at his book and then at the people surrounding him. He looks at his reflection in the glass window, takes in the black frame of his glasses and his pale skin and the bags under his eyes and the amounts of clothes he’s wearing – all black – and he’s _looking_. For the first time, he’s really looking.

Ilse’s words echo in his head as he gathers his things and shrugs into his denim jacket.

If he doesn’t do something soon, he’s going to kill himself before he ever hits thirty-five and he knows this. They all know it. Hanschen’s sad eyes and Ilse’s stern voice and Wendla’s phone calls and his mother’s desperate attempts to reach out and his own flat, his bathroom that saw all of his breakdowns, all his surroundings know it.

And if he’s not doing this for them, or for himself, then he’s doing it for him.

He can’t go on like this.

*

January is ruthless and Melchior’s finger feel cold where they’re holding his cigarette up. He shivers like hell, has been for the past fifteen minutes, but he promised himself to do this. To do something. He promised his therapist as well, and he can’t let the woman down any more than he did in the past five years.

He takes another drag and blows the smoke out into the cloudless winter sky, the sunshine swallowing it up and making it disappear before Melchior could start the funny game of tracing it in the air. The snow crunches under his shoes as he stomps the cigarette and as well as he makes his way through the small gate and into the secured area.

It all looks the same, unsurprisingly, like time stood still in all the years Melchior hasn’t been here in the past. Big pine trees are lining the way arching up to the small church ahead of him and behind them he can see the first few tombstones lined up in their neat rows, unchanged just like the rest because the people buried there have been buried for centuries. Just like it all did when he last visited.

His breaths are coming out in small clouds as he steps through the frozen mud and snow and around the pine trees and through the first few rows of. Although it’s been years Melchior’s feet carry him all the way up to the grey stone at the outskirt of the rows, the last bits of dried leaves and vines covering it despite the harsh winter beating them down, and Melchior stops right in front of it, his feet brushing the pine arrangement in front of it.

“I haven’t been here in a while,” he starts and his voice sounds hoarse, weak, and he wonders if this really was a good idea. He feels crazy, lunatic, completely batshit, but there is no panic curling in front of his spine and in between his ribcage, so he goes on. Carries on.

“In fact, I haven’t been here in a long time. I’m sorry, I’m really fucking sorry for neglecting you like that. What kind of best friend, huh? Kinda makes me wonder why you kept up with me in the first place,” Melchior’s hands curl into fists in the pockets of his coat and he feels a hot-wired wave of nausea crawling up now instead of all the panic he usually feels when talking to someone. “You always saw the best in me, haven’t you? Even when I fucked-up Wendla. Fuck, even when I fucked you up. And how I did that? Like no one else. It’s probably the only thing I ever succeeded in. You know, your parents still blame me for all of it. They can’t even look at me when I’m around here, switch sidewalks and all that stuff you only see in movies. I feel bad for this, you know. I never wanted that to happen to them. Or to you.”

His nails bite into the palms of his hands and his teeth clench as he chases the memories away – the unhappy faces and muttered insults and the all-consuming guilt inside of him.

“I know, you’ve never really gotten along with your parents, but I think you would have worked it out. After graduation, or maybe after college. They’re good people, after all they raised you. And you’re still the best person I know. And I’m not saying this because you allowed me to read you the whole of War And Peace over summer holidays. I’m saying this because I mean it. I meant it every time I said it. And every time I told you that I loved you and only you, I meant it like I never meant anything else in my life. I like to think that we’d still be together today. Although you would have had every right to ditch my pretentious ass after school. But, uhm, yeah, I never really met anyone after you. Never really looked left or right. I also never went to church again, but that doesn’t come as a surprise, right? Couldn’t ass myself to go after you- it’s not a good place for me anymore. Mom is worried, you know. About me. Never really changed. And she also misses you. She always liked you so much.”

He can’t hold back the tears as they start to stream down his face and he doesn’t even try to. It reminds him faintly of all the times he vomited into his toilet on a Sunday morning or hasn’t picked up the phone or lay awake all night to the sound of his own heartbeat while time seemed to never really move along. But it’s so much more relieving than all of these things, as if a fraction of the coiled up tension inside of him can finally ease away into the cold winter air.

“I get along with Hanschen now too. Crazy, right? You always seemed to like him, for whatever reason you had. I never really understood it, but I have the feeling he liked you too. I mean, you sat next to each other in class for years, so it shouldn’t be such a wild guess. But, yeah. I even was invited to Ernst’s and his wedding. Yeah, they’re still together, I couldn’t really believe that as well. And Ilse and Wendla are also together. It’s like everyone around us found their missing piece. They’re all happy, you know, so very happy. But I’m glad they are. They deserve it.”

His string of words is interrupted by all the sobs that leave his mouth and he’s shaking now, his whole upper body leaning forward with the heaves his lungs take between crying and talking.

“I miss you so much, you don’t understand. You’d probably would call me melodramatic now, as you always did when we had our good days, but I do. I miss you every damn day that you’re not with me. You should be, you should. I am going crazy without you. You clearly always have been the best thing about me back then, Mom was right about that. God, I miss you like crazy. And I still love you, if I haven’t made that clear. But, hell, I do. I love you so much, Moritz, that I sometimes wish I would be in that grave right next to you although you wouldn’t have wanted it. I don’t know, I, I just hope you know that I was sincere every time I told you. I know, I never said it as often as you would have deserved to hear it, but maybe that was because I thought we’d have more than the short time that we had. I love you, Moritz, and I can’t go to church because of it and I’m so sorry for everything that happened and if I could change one thing, it would be my behavior back then. I would have been with you. I would have never let you go away on your own.”

All he sees is a pool of white and grey and fading green and he blinks a few times. His eyes can’t seem to refocus under all the tears flowing down and his heart seems to fall out of his chest and right onto the snow if he keeps going like this. He feels so exposed.

“I probably will never be happy again in this lifetime, but I think I deserve that for all that I’ve down. I hope that you found some peace wherever you are now. You loved me for so long and I could only show you how much I love you for such a short time, but I do. I still do. I love you, Moritz, and it’s sometimes the only thing that keeps me going. I never deserved your love. Not one bit of it. But I’m glad I got it, I’m selfish that way, you know me. I’m so fucking glad you loved _me_ out of all people.”

It’s like some weight has been lifted of his shoulder and Melchior uses the sleeve of his coat to wipe his face and his eyes dry. He takes another heavy breath, his lungs still aching, and looks down at the tombstone, reads the inscription he knows like he knows the back of his hand, and his hands are shaking a bit as he takes a step forward and touches it. The stone is cold and his hands are already turning numb, but he’s a bit more composed when he draws back and takes a few steps backwards to take it all on in. His best friend.

“Mom named one of the apple trees in your honour,” he says quietly.

And then he turns around and moves back between the pine trees and down the arched way and through the small gate and to his car and he doesn’t look back.

He doesn’t look back, but for the first time in a long while, he feels like he can breathe easier.

*

Melchior and Wendla are spending the Sunday afternoon together. He agreed to meet up with her after church and as they’re sitting next to each other on the park bench, an uneasy silence between them, he wonders if it was a good idea to agree to that. They still get along rather well, always have, but their interactions were mainly dictated by social gatherings and easy banter that reminds him of the time before he ruined her whole life.

They never talk about that, not ever, and it’s like they made a silent pact to not, under any circumstances, bring it up around each other. Melchior can work with that quite well, seeing Ada is enough to push him into a spiral of self-hate and the well-known guilt and he doesn’t need Wendla to bring it up vocally. He has the distinct feeling that she never thinks about it as well, or that she trained her brain well enough to push it to the back of her mind whenever she sees him.

So, they rather bask in silence without anything to talk about than talk about that. It’s alright, he guesses, it’s better than not seeing each other at all.

The mild March air is nice and although they’re still in winter clothes, it’s not freezing and neither of them seem to be physically uncomfortable, except for the crippling steel-trap around Melchior’s lungs that doctors have diagnosed as a mixture of several mental illnesses, but that’s something he deals with every day, so it doesn’t really count for his analysis of his current situation.

Wendla clears her throat into the silence, which makes Melchior look over to her.

“I heard that you went home in January,” she says and doesn’t look at him.

Of course she knows. He told his therapist about it and then he told Hanschen and Hanschen told Ernst and Ilse and Ilse told Wendla. It’s not a surprise and Melchior doesn’t feel much of a shock, so he just nods, hoping she sees it in the corner of her vision.

“I did,” he still confirms for her.

“Did you?” she asks vaguely, the question hanging in the silence between them like a neon sign, as if she needs to hear it from him to believe that it happened.

  
“Yeah,” he says curtly. “I did.”

Now it’s her turn to nod at his words, her hands tangled in the maroon scarf in her lap.

“That’s a good thing,” she says, her voice kind. “The right thing to do. I’m glad you did it. You haven’t been there since-

“Since the funeral, I know,” Melchior finishes for her, not feeling bad for taking the words out of her mouth. He needed to say it himself to confirm it for both of them.

It’s silent between them again and Melchior wonders again if this wasn’t a truly horrendous idea to spend a Sunday. They’re clearly not getting along as well as they thought, despite them being practically a family – the core of their family in particular.

“I think we should do this more often,” Wendla proposes, her body now turned towards Melchior on the bench, her hand nudging his shoulder.

He turns towards her as well. “You think so?”

She shrugs and a small smile appears on her mouth. “Yeah. Let’s turn this into a regular thing. Meeting here on this park bench, talking about our week. Just us two.”

“Just us _two_?” Melchior doesn’t sound as convinced as he’d like to. His voice is shaky and there’s uncertainty lacing all of these three words like grace laces through the words of a prayer.

“Yes,” Wendla nods frantically. “This could be good for us. Plus, Ada wants us to get along and right now, this-“ she gestures between them. “doesn’t look like getting along to me.”

Melchior just stares at her for a few seconds, his mind taking a while to comprehend that Wendla wants to be friends (is it that? Friends?) again, with _him_. Maybe he’s sound asleep and having the weirdest dream of a lifetime because this sounds like he made it up in his head.

“Don’t look so shocked, you idiot,” she tells him, her sharp voice getting him out of his head again. “We used to get along. We can do this again.”

Melchior frowns. This is not really the kind of reasoning he would have used to undermine the point, but well, it’s Wendla after all. And Wendla never needed a real reason, she has her determination for that.

“Okay?” he tries to build a bridge between them.

His therapist would be proud of him right now. When Wendla’s whole face lights up in victory and she hugs him, he doesn’t draw back or sneer or moves right away from her, and that is definitely development.

“I don’t forgive you for the past,” Wendla reminds him and, hell, he can’t blame her for saying that. “But I want us to be a family.”

Melchior looks away from her and down at his curled up hands. He eases his muscles and tries to let a bit of the strained tension out of them. This is the right direction, there’s no need to panic, he tells himself.

This is what others – Ilse – would put under moving on in the dictionary. And is that not what he’s supposed to do? Moving on. Growing up. He should be doing that.

So, he tries a smile – an honest one – and turns towards Wendla, who smiles back.

“Me too.”

He doesn’t lie when he says it.

*

Ada is fifteen when she has her first serious boyfriend. His name is Ben – well, short for Benjamin – and he’s sixteen and polite when he shakes Melchior’s hand and has the kind of dry humor that even makes Hanschen chuckle. He helps Wendla in the kitchen and he talks about his childhood with Ilse and Ernst also seems to be surprisingly convinced by him despite his not perfectly-tailored table manners.

It has been kind of cruel of all of them to let him meet each of them at the same time. But then that has also been Ada’s idea, so no one of them really is to blame for his frightened look when he first put a foot into Hanschen and Ernst’s dining room. But the young man made it quite well through the evening although his nerves have been basically audible over their chatter.

Melchior can’t blame him. Parents are always a tough nut to crack and the possibility of them not liking you isn’t as low as some paint it out to be. Not everyone can have Ernst’s parents, who basically asked Hanschen when he’ll propose to their son when he was officially introduced to them at the age of fifteen as well.

And Melchior knows best of all that not every parent will like you.

But he prides himself with being as kind as possible to Ben when he asks him about his work in college and if Ada and he have something in common. (“The eyes,” he says jokingly, but when he looks over at Ada he knows that she has his stubbornness and his intellect as well, and his nose too.) He tries to keep the embarrassing stories of the past few years to a minimum because he always hated this the most when Moritz was over at his for dinner and his mother could not stop reminding them of every little thing Melchior ever did and, in the process of doing it, fucked up. Therefore, he leaves the storytelling to Wendla, she has more to say anyway.

Most of them are now gathered around the ground floor of the house, their dinner ended about half an hour ago. Melchior can see Ben in a conversation with Ilse and Hanschen and he prays that the poor soul will make it out of this one alive – he seems like a nice bloke after all. But maybe it’s better that he’s talking to them and not any longer to him. The only thing Melchior’s got going for him is that his medication finally seems to be working and that he now can get a full-night’s sleep. This breakthrough surely can’t be shuffled under friendly small-talk, as much as movies want to make it look like it can.

So, he resides with his glass of water in the back of the living room, watching the scenes around him on. But he doesn’t feel like there’s the glass wall between him and them anymore. The door is open, he made sure of that, and he can step into the action any time he wants now. He just doesn’t feel like it right now. He likes to watch too, it’s what makes him feel most at peace.

“Hey, Dad?”

Ada is appearing at his side and he turns towards her, surprised her sudden emergence next to him. He didn’t notice her coming up to him.

He clears his throat. “What’s up?”

Ada’s gaze seems to across the room, more accurately on her boyfriend, but then her gaze flickers back and right onto her father’s face.

“Before dinner, when I walked by, Hans talked with Ernst about today. He said it would be a special day for you,” she starts, sounding a bit sheepish. Well, she got the eavesdropping from his as well, there’s no mistake. “I’m curious. Mom also said that today is a special day.”

Oh, Melchior knows where this is going.

“I don’t know. Maybe you could tell me about it? I want to know what’s going on.”

No one has ever told Ada the story of her father and his first and only love. And up until now, there was no need for it. Melchior always told himself, he would wait until the right moment would show itself and then he would sit her down and explain it to her.

It’s the start of April and Melchior gestures for her to sit down with him at the empty dining room table.

He takes a deep breath. “You know how a friend of us passed away a long time ago?”

She nods, a frown on her face that reminds him distinctly of Wendla. She clearly also is her mother’s face.

“His name was Moritz,” he begins, and when he tells her the whole story, everything that happened between them and to him and to his friends, he realizes that there never would have been the one right moment. He would have waited the rest of his life for the moment to appear, but it would have never happened. He would have taken the story to his grave, untold.

No, he must take matters into his own hands and make it the right moment.

And when Ada grips his hands in the middle of it all – right when he tells her about the days leading up to losing Moritz – he knows that it will never feel as right as it does now. He may never fully move on like Ilse wants him to and like Hanschen encourages him to, but he doesn’t feel stuck anymore. There is no panic in his chest and no steel weighting his lungs down and his hands are not shaking.

There is no guilt or shame as he tells her about the summer triangle. There is just himself.

And, for the first time in a while, that’s enough.

 

 

*

 

 _No matter what, I'll be here_  
_When it feels so big_  
_'Til it all feels so small  
_ _\- Pasek and Paul_

**Author's Note:**

> The Fifth of April will never be the same for me, so there's that. And I probably fucked up the timeline again because Melchior's age in my head does not line up with what it actually is in here (I guess? Anyway.)
> 
> so, this whole thing is mainly finished now, but we'll see, maybe I'll post a small snippet of this universe once in a while. nevertheless, thank you to everyone of you that read this. you're great. you can leave a comment if you want, and I'm also always up for chatting on tumblr (andreinbolkonsky) or twitter (xbigboysdontcry) where I will never not cry about spring awakening. which is the one thing we all learned.
> 
> friendly reminder: you are loved, you are enough and you will achieve great things. you are right just the way you are, a living and breathing thing. keep going.


End file.
